A building whose four inner walls are blank proves a daunting environment for somebody of your disposition. Your anxiety isn’t helped by the fact that each wall is of equal height and width. After all, should you not offer these four equal features an equal amount of attention? Should you not stare as intently at each, and even touch each surface an equal number of times?

Yet which wall are you to touch first, and why? You soon begin to realise that no correct order has made itself apparent, and that you, sadly, are in control. In touching one random wall before the others – perhaps the one on the right – you have unwittingly stated a preference. You have started the ball rolling from an arbitrary point, and no matter how many times you lay the tips of your fingers against the jagged white paintwork, against the cold impassive planes that border your world, you will always have touched one wall first.

One wall! Or rather, one fingertip-shaped portion of wall: one chance set of coordinates in space and time from which your future neuroses shall unravel. And as you try desperately to put things right, to rush from surface to surface, tapping each wall in tune to a carefully constructed melody as though keeping the world in order, you begin to curse the date of this horror’s conception. You wish you could go back to the start, when the world was pure and all walls were untouched; you wish you could place your hand on all four of the surfaces simultaneously; you wish you could touch every point on these walls for all moments in time. In essence, you wish you were as God: all seeing and all knowing; not a foolish entity that came from an arbitrary point, to live for an arbitrary age, with an arbitrary purpose, forever running from wall to wall, forever running out of time, tapping and screaming from birth until death.